by Paul Batista
“Hey, sorry. You can’t imagine the things I’ve been called. The name Garafalo confuses a lot of people. Ask these other guys around the table, especially the good-looking Polish guy over there, what people have done with their names. You gotta get used to it, you gotta have a sense of humor about it.”
“Thanks for the insight, Mr. Garafalo,” Horace Clark said.
“No problem.”
“Let me ask you this, sir,” Clark said, “what happened to your baseball prospects? I’m just curious.”
“I decided there was another line of work I was going to like better.”
“And what was that?”
“Gangster.”
Three of the agents laughed aloud. Yang glanced disapprovingly at them, the censorious expression of a grade-school teacher. Their laughter slowly, defiantly subsided.
“Why,” Clark asked, “did you make that choice?”
“Who knows? But my baseball training came in real handy. I always had a bat nearby. Hitting a head is a lot easier to hit than a speedy baseball. So before I went to jail I had two names, Tony the Horse, Tony the Batter.”
“What,” Horace Clark asked, “did “The Horse” mean?”
Garafalo glanced at the Asian girl. “I’ve got a dick the size of a Louisville Slugger.”
Yvette Yang, unblinking, stared at the yellow legal pad.
“Ask the commissioner,” Garafalo said. “She’s known that for a long, long time. She knew it when she sat here seven years ago when our friendship was so hot again, but I didn’t know until that minute that she was part of the hit squad that wound up with me spending years at the Supermax in Colorado. At the trial they ended up playing tapes of me talking to Gina Carbone, my friend, who used to wear a wire when we drove around or went to restaurants together.”
Again adjusting the right joint of his slender glasses—in what Garafalo now understood was a nervous tic—Clark asked, “Are we to understand that from time to time you and the commissioner are in an intimate relationship?”
“Good guess.”
“When was the last time you and Commissioner Carbone were friends?”
“We’ve been good friends for two years.”
“How,” Yvette Yang asked, “did the most recent friendship begin?” “Our families still live close to each other. Italians on Staten Island like to have barbecues in the summer. I was out of Supermax for two, three weeks. The barbecue was at her parents’ house. They have a nice patio. I just walked over with my family, like we’d been doing since I was a kid. Gina was there. She was already the police chief. She had a security detail. I guess she was really surprised to see me because she and her people began to leave.”
“What happened next?”
“I called out ‘Gina.’ She stopped. She looked great. She let me walk over to her. I said, ‘Gina, no hard feelings, please. It was your job, you did what you had to do.’”
Yvette Yang asked, “Did you mean that?”
“Not one fucking word. I wanted to kill her. She had even had the tapes going when we were in bed. They, by the way, were useless, hundreds of hours of them. All you could hear was an hour or so of me banging her and her screaming, More, more, yes, yes!” He paused. “My lawyer, Vinnie Sorrentino, wanted to play one of those tapes for the jury. Vinnie’s a great guy, a great lawyer. When the judge asked what the point was of letting a jury listen to an hour of pornography, Vinnie said, Prosecutorial misconduct. Even the judge, an old woman, laughed, but she said no. Ms. Yang, do you scream or moan?”
Serious-faced, Clark asked, “Did you, at this barbecue, say anything else to the commissioner?”
“‘I was only doing my job, too.’ That’s what I told her. ‘No hard feelings,’ I said.”
“What happened next?” Clark asked.
“I had gotten a job as a salesman at the Mercedes Benz place on Queens Boulevard. I knew I was a good salesman. Back in my ball-playing days some writer for the Daily News said watching me play was like watching a top-of-the-line Mercedes racing on a highspeed track. I still have a copy of the article.”
“That,” Yvette Yang said, “is a very rapid period of time for someone just released from Supermax, the highest security prison in the United States, to find work at a prestigious auto dealership. Is the owner of the dealership part of organized crime or connected to it?”
“That’s none of your fucking business.”
“Let’s return to Commissioner Carbone,” Clark said. “Tell us the next event.”
“At the barbecue I said to Gina, ‘Wow, now you’re the chief, the capo di tutti capi.’ And I told her what dealership I was working for, just casually. And then she left with her security detail, but not before kissing my eighty year-old mother and father. Just like friends do.”
“And next?”
“Next, just a few days later, I’m at my desk at the dealership, and it’s a slow day, and my desk phone, with caller ID, rings. The little screen that tells you whose calling says Pay Phone. That’s really unusual, I think. There must have been six pay phones left in all of New York. But I’m a salesman and, hey, you never know.
“And so I take the call and it’s Gina. She obviously didn’t want to use her phone at the PD or her cell phone. A pay phone call is untraceable. Right away I think Fuck, this is great. Bingo.
“And Gina bullshits for a little while. How’s the job going? How are your kids? Bullshit like that. And then Gina, who was never shy, asked if I can get together with her at that coffee shop near LaGuardia off the Grand Central Parkway. It’s just a silver-sided coffee shop, no name on it, just a red neon sign on it that says Diner. The kind of place where limo and cab drivers stop off for coffee and hamburgers at all hours of the day and night. Transients, people tired from long flights, taxi and limo drivers on breaks.”
“What did you say?” Horace Clark asked.
“I joked. I said to her, ‘You gonna be wearing a wire this time, Gina?’”
“And?”
“She said, ‘Come on, Tony, those days are long over. I’ll let you take me into the bathroom first and I’ll strip completely so you can check for wires.’”
Tony had noticed that Yvette Yang’s eyes blinked very infrequently. She said, “You do realize, Mr. Garafalo, don’t you, that Mr. Clark and I are law enforcement agents of the federal government. As are all the other officers in this room. Lying to us is, in and of itself, a federal offense punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.”
“Not a problem, Ms. Yang. I’m not lying. Ask Gina. Ask Commissioner Carbone.” Tony Garafalo knew that the other agents, all men, all trying not to smile, were having the time of their lives as they listened to him.
Smooth as a dark marble, Clark asked, “Did the meeting at the diner take place?”
“The next day. Middle of the afternoon. She came in a little Toyota one of her brothers owned. She wore an oversize Mets baseball cap. She was already famous, she didn’t want to be recognized. If she had security with her, I didn’t see them. There were a few guys at the counter who were already there when I got there a few minutes before her. They didn’t necessarily look like limo or cab drivers taking a break.” Tony glanced up at the male agents at the far end of the table. “No, I didn’t take her to the bathroom to check out whether she was wearing a wire.”
“What did you discuss?”
“Discuss? We weren’t there to talk about a nuclear treaty with Iran. After half an hour or so she wrote down on a napkin what her address was—it’s an apartment on East 79th Street and East End Avenue near one of the downtown entrance ramps to the FDR so that she has an easy time getting downtown to One Police Plaza, and she said she wanted to cook for me that night.”
“What did you say?” Clark asked.
“Maybe she’s not your type, Mr. Clark, but Gina was, and is, a real good-looking woman. Besides, not once in my life have I ever said no to a woman who asked me to dinner in her house. That’s always a bingo.”
One of t
he agents at the far end of the table suddenly said, “Tony, you must need a bottle of water by now, right?”
“Sure, thanks.”
The agent walked to Tony and put a bottle of water in front of him. “Thanks, guy,” Tony said.
Clark, who didn’t appear to approve that one of his agents had offered water to Tony, asked, “And next?”
“I went over. We ate. And I fucked her. Or she fucked me. Or we fucked each other. I guess it depends on how you look at it.”
Yvette Yang asked, “And how long did this relationship, as I would call it, go on?”
“For two years. Until last night. I don’t think she has plans to see me again.”
“Did she,” Horace Clark asked, “tell you anything about her work?”
Tony, with a twist of his heavy, powerful hands, snapped open the sealed cap of the water bottle.
“Listen to me real careful now. We spent at least three nights a week together for two years. She had this thing about the city being vulnerable. What pissed her off even more was that the Feds, the Homeland Insecurity shitheads she called them, didn’t understand New York. She said the mayor was a great guy but a garbagehead, a pill user; Xanax, Vicodin, that shit, and that he thought the Feds were idiots, too, but he was too busy with other stuff, particularly the Masterpiece Theatre girlfriend he had, to ask too many questions about the Feds’ plans for protecting the city.
“So Gina put together her own plans. She had this huge budget. She told me the number once but it was so big it was like what we used to call a telephone book number and it didn’t really mean nothing to me. She started telling me she was using chunks of the budget to hire guys, tough guys, who’d been in Afghanistan and Iraq to organize special groups that would know what to do if any part of the city got attacked.”
“Why,” Horace Clark asked, “did she tell you these things?”
“Ask her. Pillow talk, I guess. She had always loved for me to screw her. When I finished her off each time, she got tired. And she talked. I heard about the hit list. I heard about state-of-the-art secret prisons on piers that looked like they were crumbling into the East River. I heard about something she called Code Apache. When I asked her whether she had hired Tonto and the Lone Ranger for Code Apache, she thought that was funny and said no, it was her plan to lock down Manhattan if an attack happened here. She told me about a guy named Davidson, a real killer, someone we really could have used in the Gambino family.”
“Why,” Yvette Yang asked, “are you telling us all this? You have no immunity from prosecution, you have no lawyer, and you are saying extraordinary things about the commissioner of the New York City Police Department and even the mayor of the city.”
Refreshed by the water, Tony said, “Did you ever hear of revenge? Payback? I was at her baptism. I took care of getting her what she wanted—bat girl—when she was a kid. I was her lover when she got to be old enough to have lovers. We lived on the same street. Our uncles were in the same business. I drove Gina Carbone to the airport when she left for basic training. I screwed her the night before she left.”
Tony stared only at Yvette Yang, who was obviously afraid of him or had nothing but contempt for him. “We were friends. For life. And then eight years ago she decided to work with a group of you people. They knew she knew me. They knew we were—what’s the right word—dating? She taped everything I told her.
“And then she sat in this same room. She could have warned me off, given me a heads up. Like a friend would do. And then she testified at my trial.” Tony sipped more water. “Anything else you want to know, Ms. Yang. Or don’t you have friends?”
Suddenly Clark said, “We could use a bathroom break. If you want to use the bathroom, Mr. Garafalo, we’ll have to handcuff you as we walk through the hallways.”
Tony Garafalo waved a hand and stayed seated. “Go enjoy yourselves. I’m good.”
***
“Who is, or was, Raj Gandhi?”
“I read lots of newspapers. It got to be a habit in prison, where I read the fucking New York Times in that dirty newsprint that got all over my hands. Now I’ve even got a Kindle. I had no idea in prison that there was such a thing. I read the Times there.”
“And?”
“I started seeing the names of reporters I hadn’t seen before. When I was on trial I hated the two reporters from the Times who were there all the time. They were supposed to be experts on the Mafia. They didn’t know shit from Shinola about the families. Everything they knew was from the movies. Both Jews. They studied the Godfather movies. That, they thought, made them experts. When it came to my trial they were hanging reporters, just like in the old Western movies there were hanging judges.
“But when I came out of Supermax, where, believe it or not, I got to know the Unabomber, a pretty sweet guy actually, those two reporters were gone. Retired, fired, dropped in the East River. Who the hell knows? Over the last two years on my gorgeous little Kindle I saw mainly new names of reporters.”
“And one of those was Raj Gandhi?” Yvette Yang asked.
“Very perceptive, Ms. Yang. I liked the name, I liked his articles. I looked him up on Google, another thing I never saw or heard of at Supermax. He was new to the city. I read his articles about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“So I started calling him. I wanted him to know about the hit list, the prison on the piers, Gina’s secret army, what she thought about Homeland Security.”
“Did you tell him who you were?” Clark asked.
“Tony Bennett.” From somewhere in the room one of the agents laughed, briefly. “Come on, Horace, grow up. I gave him information. I wanted him to work. I’m a salesman, an actor. When you’ve got a guy from Queens in a Mercedes show room, you talk Queens. When you’ve got a twenty-five year-old kid from Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs who wants a Mercedes convertible you talk his talk. I’ve got this God-given skill of imitating accents and voices. I know how to do these things. Remember, I’m a criminal.”
“So,” Yvette Yang asked, “why should we believe anything you say to us now?”
“That’s your choice.”
Clark asked quietly, “Did you kill Raj Gandhi?”
“Of course not. Never saw him. I only talked to him. I used a wiseass Queens accent. Once he let the world know what I wanted him to know, I was happy I had picked out such a smart dothead. I had no use for him any longer. He did what I wanted. No need to hurt him.”
Yvette Yang said, “We have videotape of you entering and leaving his building.”
“I knew where he lived. It was right in the phone book. There’s a gorgeous thirty-year-old in that building. She’s one of my other girlfriends. Her name is Gloria Kopechne. She’s something like the grandniece of that girl Teddy Kennedy killed on Martha’s Vineyard in, what the hell was it? 1969? Take a look through all your videotapes. Go talk to her. There are probably thirty videotapes of me going into and out of that lobby. I was fucking her. She is kind of a rich kid. No job. I had an open invite to go there to screw her anytime I wanted. I was even in the elevator with her and Mr. Gandhi the day he did his blog-heard-round-the-world. He had no idea who I was. But I’ll tell you this. He was a very polite little dothead.”
Tony drank more water. “Go ask the commissioner. My guess is she had one of her boys hit him. Gina always had a bad temper. She believes in revenge, payback, anything you want to call it, as much as I do.”
Tony had, in fact, been naked in Gloria Kopechne’s bed ten minutes after his perfectly aimed shot had entered Raj Gandhi’s forehead.
Clark removed his glasses. He looked at the far end of the table where the agents sat. “Take this gentleman to his cell. And two of you go visit Ms. Kopechne right now.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CAMERON DEWAR, AS soon as he was unexpectedly and miraculously released from the conference room on the thirtieth floor of the new federal office building that overlooked the cluster of new and nineteenth-century courthouses on Foley Sq
uare in downtown Manhattan, walked the eight miles to the apartment on 82nd Street. He knew that after this one last time he would never return to it even though it had been his beloved home for years, because when the two unknown agents had suddenly told him he was free to leave, they had already turned on a vivid, wall-mounted video screen that displayed, as it was happening, the burning of his lover and best friend in a cage on the windswept Hudson River. Cam threw up in a wastebasket. The anonymous agents in suits didn’t flinch. One of them casually said, “That’s the door. Get out. We don’t need your sorry, worn-out ass anymore.”
And the other agent said, “And thanks for letting us know about the soup kitchen. It made it easy to find the Angel of Life.”
When he opened the oak door to the gorgeous old-world apartment, Cam was overwhelmed by the silence, the stillness, darkness. The wounded Oliver was in the hospital. Gabriel was dead. They had made this home vivid and vital. It was now only a collection of objects which he had selected and for which Gabriel had paid: the Chesterfield sofa, the vases, the wall sconces that suffused all their space with seductive light.
Literally uncertain how he would go about closing down this phase of his life, Cam stood in the kitchen and cried. This was grief, and he knew it. The sense of total loss and destruction. When he was a boy in the Deep South, his father, a Baptist minister who never forgave the fact that Cam was gay, often read that passage in the Gospels in which Peter, expressing his undying love for Jesus and that he would lay down his life for him, was told by Jesus that he would three times deny ever knowing him. And Peter did make that denial three times on the night Jesus was arrested. And Peter, too, had cried.
Cam saw on the rattan coffee table the pile of printed sheets with the e-mails Gabriel Hauser had exchanged with his Afghan lover. Cam saw from the way the papers were organized that Gabriel had taken time to read them all, one of the last acts of his life. As a doctor, Gabriel was a methodical man. He had separated the pages with meaningless e-mail chatter from those pages that suggested Gabriel’s love and determination to bring Mohammad to the United States.